1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to means for creating a billing statement automatically and digitally with attached advertising copy and the published page containing such advertising copy.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Publishers of periodicals and dailies derive significant revenue from printing advertisements in their publications. Traditionally, the method of billing the advertiser, or customer, for the publication of the customer""s advertisement is to send a billing sheet, or statement, listing the date of publication, an advertisement identifier, and the charge for the advertisement. Along with each billing line item is included a copy of the advertisement and a copy of the actual page or pages on which the advertisement was published. These hard copies of the advertisements and page are often called tearsheets. The tearsheets were, in the past, manually created by persons who gathered the physical tearsheets and attached them to the billing statements, resulting in a great expenditure of labor. Also, the billing statement created in this way can become physically bulky and unnecessarily hard to handle and expensive to deliver to the customer.
Therefore, there exists a need to automate this billing process and digitize it to make for easier storage and delivery.
The present invention provides for automated creation, and if desired, removable storage and delivery of billing statements for published advertisements. A method according to the present invention requires that the advertisement copy and the page on which it is published, if different, both be put in a digital document format such as tiff,jpeg or the like; and assigned unique customer, or advertiser, identifiers, such as serial numbers, identifying numbers, unique names, or the like associated with the document. The advertisement copy and the page may contain cross referenced indicators. For example, the information header on the advertisement copy may contain information on its page location, while the page document information header may contain information on each customer having an advertisement thereon.
The advertisement copy and page files of images and their associated information headers are created; whether by original composition on a digital publishing system or through later digitization by scanning or the like; and stored in a first, or first and second publications searchable database. A billing statement application is then overlayed on or interfaced with the publications databases in order to match the unique identifiers of the customers in the statement application to the unique customer identifiers in the publications databases. A search and retrieve command is sent to identify each advertisement and its associated page, within a particular date range and for a particular publication, if the publication database file structure makes this necessary. Copies of the digital documents representing the published advertisement copy and its associated page are linked, or referenced, to the billing document line items and stored as files within the billing statement application.
The billing statement, with each associated advertisement copy and page image, may then be electronically accessed through the billing statement application and transmitted electronically or stored on removable digital storage media such as diskettes or CD-Roms as desired for permanent record and shipping to the customer.